A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

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Archive of posts filed under the New Mexico category.

People, this is right in the middle of my town. Right in the middle. This is about half a mile from where I took the last picture, up a new riding and walking trail just north of the old Route 66 bridge right in the middle of Albuquerque. The river’s up this year, it was …

Through much of Albuquerque, the Rio Grande flows between levees at a grade slightly higher than the surrounding valley floor. As a result, storm water must be pumped over the levees into the river’s central channel, with a string of pumping stations and big pipe outfalls like this, on the east side of the river …

Riding my bike late this morning, I stopped to admire a roadrunner in the trail. As you can see from the picture, it’s a ratty bit of trail (Gritty? We have more words for the sublime than the mundane.) flanked by the freeway to the north and a treeline to the south bordering old farm …

My friend and collaborator Becky Bixby, a University of New Mexico biologist and the associate director of our Water Resources Program (she is our program’s science brain), on why she wasn’t at the March For Science yesterday: UNM’s Becky Bixby won’t be at the march. But that’s only because since the beginning of the semester, …

We still have some slots available for fall 2017 in the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program. When I left my career in journalism, it was for the chance to join a community of people at the University of New Mexico who are passionate about water. We’re looking for students who think that way …

My friend Lauren Villagran had a lovely piece in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about what happens when you turn on a river: Unlike in Albuquerque, where the river is always wet, the wide, sandy bed of the Rio Grande is almost always dry in southern New Mexico below the Hatch Valley until irrigation season begins. …

The Rio Grande through Albuquerque has been rising this week, thanks to a combination of a great snowpack and a quirk in the river’s operating rules. The snowpack part is obvious – it’s big and melting fast – the rule quirk less so. Under Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact, we cannot store water …

I took a detour from the bike trail this morning to see water in the Albuquerque Main Canal, which brings irrigation water to Albuquerque’s strangely urbanized rural valley. There are 350 miles of canals threaded through the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Albuquerque Division, bringing water to something like 10,000 acres of land. It was …

New work by UNM colleagues (Dadhi Adhikari and others) suggests municipal water users are willing to pay for work to improve the health of the watersheds that supply the city’s water – in this case Albuquerque: Econometric results show evidence of … significant public support for forest restoration – linking forests to faucets. (Dadhi is …